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The Origin of Life and the Fallacy of Composition

During a recent discussion of the origin of
life on Facebook some atheist
friends challenged me to get up to speed on abiogenesis research and understand
that life has essentially been created by scientists in a laboratory. To prove
the point they directed me to an article at the Daily Mail, "Scientists Create Artificial Life."[1]Given that
scientists have created a living bacterium, they suggested, there remains no reason
for thinking that the creation of life requires the intervention of God. So I'm
supposed to think that the mystery of life's origin has been solved and any
suggestion otherwise invokes the "God of the gaps" fallacy.

Now as mentioned on the Facebook thread, I had issues with all this, beginning with the article itself:

1.
The misleading headline. There's a huge difference between creating artificial
life from nothing but chemicals, as the headline implies, and reverse
engineering an existing bacterium to produce a "rebuilt" version.
Without a diligent construction effort using an extant bacterium as a template,
an abiogenesis "experiment" could not hope to get off the ground.

2. Abiogenesis is purported to be an undirected "natural" process.
Clearly a "painstaking" process involving a team of devoted
researchers and a lab full of tools and technologies is not undirected. May as
well load a herd of swine onto a 737 to show that pigs fly.

3. But I do agree with Dr. Venter, in that the "broader implications"
here are that life has been (intelligently) designed.

My conclusion: "Reverse-engineering
genetic material within preexisting living organisms is not abiogenesis, and
intelligent living organisms spending 15 years and $400 million of research in
an organized, intentional, directed effort to create more living organisms is
not abiogenesis." That pretty much ended my part in the discussion.

But I think there's another problem facing the
prospect of abiogenesis, from a logical rather than empirical-scientific
standpoint. This has to do with the fact that abiogenesis is not so much a
testable theory in the first place, but a research program consisting of distinct subdomains.
Ian Musgrave explains:

While the basic
concept of abiogenesis can be stated simply (development of life from
non-living substances), and is often referred to as a theory or hypothesis,
abiogenesis isn't a really a theory per se (this is not unique to abiogenesis,
it is true of most other "big" theories as well). What it is, is a
well defined research program with a number of defined and well connected
sub-domains (origin of building blocks, origin of polymers, self-replicator
dynamics, transition of a self replicator system to a genetic system, origin of
the genetic code, origin of metabolic systems from prebiotic precursors)….

In each of the
subdomains is a number of hypotheses and theories (basic building blocks
[heterotrophic theory, autotrophic theory], RNA world theory [pure RNA,
cofactor catalysis, ribopeptide world]), each of these theories is then subject
to a number of experimental and observational programs, and some have far more
support than others…[2]

Confirmation that abiogenesis could actually occur in a
natural environment would require confirmation that each segment or phase of
the overall process could occur. This has not been done yet. But even if, or
when, it is confirmed that each subprocess could occur, we would need to piece
all these processes together. After all, to say that confirmation of each of the subdomain
processes required for abiogenesis to occur somehow "adds up" to confirmation of the whole
process, is to say that a whole equals the sum of its parts. And to say that a
whole equals the sum of its parts is to commit the fallacy of composition.

The act of creating a living bacterium is not reducible to so
many individual processes and parts any more than a symphony performance is
reducible to so many individual players, instruments, and musical notes. In order
to confirm abiogenesis we would need
to confirm that the entire process
could occur – i.e., that all the individual subdomain processes are acting together,
in space and time, in a particular way. To confirm abiogenesis, then, would require scrapping the subdivided research
program and starting over with a much more ambitious objective. Otherwise all
that has been demonstrated is that a complex entity consists of many parts,
which is something everyone should have known going into the discussion.

Comments

Good job, Don. I agree with your conclusions. Still, it would be worthwhile for you to see what's happening in recent research on abiogenesis. There's no reason to think that it couldn't or didn't happen through natural processes.

True of the emergence of life per se within the localized combines of our oceans. But that does not answer the question where the oceans came from. That can be answered but just follow the chain of causes all the way back to the origin of the universe and there is a reason to keep asking where it all came from. The experiment producing bacterium does not answer that question.

Excellent article, Don. As I pointed out in my own most recent comments on this issue, the creation of life is a highly complex process and it is becoming more and more clear that it is very unlikely (if not practically impossible) for it to arise by chance. As Dr. James Tour, Professor of Chemistry at Rice University has stated:

"THOSE WHO THINK scientists understand the issues of prebiotic chemistry are wholly misinformed. Nobody understands them. Maybe one day we will. But that day is far from today. It would be far more helpful (and hopeful) to expose students to the massive gaps in our understanding. They may find a firmer—and possibly a radically different—scientific theory. The basis upon which we as scientists are relying is so shaky that we must openly state the situation for what it is: it is a mystery."

I agree that there's no reason to think abiogenesis "couldn't" happen, at least in minimal terms of logical coherence or physical possibility, but many reasons to think it didn't happen – including reasons given in my post.

BK, I appreciate your comments, and the referral to James Tour. I started to watch an interview with him some months ago and was duly impressed, not just with his many and lofty credentials, but his modesty and the clarity of his speech.

... but many reasons to think it didn't happen – including reasons given in my post.

I didn't see that many reasons. You did say: "to say that confirmation of each of the subdomain processes required for abiogenesis to occur somehow "adds up" to confirmation of the whole process, is to say that a whole equals the sum of its parts. And to say that a whole equals the sum of its parts is to commit the fallacy of composition." True enough. But that's not the claim of scientists. What we call 'life' is emergent. What you get is greater than the sum of its parts.

Angiogenesis, First must overcome hydrolysis, then oxygen,then radiation. When scientists eliminate those 3 things from there experiments. They can't claim there results would occur in the real world, or natural environment. Water,O2, and radiation will prevent a natural formation of life

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